


looks through his window’s eye

by marxeline



Category: Schitt's Creek
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-16
Updated: 2019-06-16
Packaged: 2020-05-13 03:51:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,707
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19243264
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/marxeline/pseuds/marxeline
Summary: He wanted to know what it was like, for David, to actually deal with those thoughts, to write them down and sit with them, to flip back to them, to have the proof of some kind of continuity, developing story, sitting in the pages. Patrick wondered what it was like for David now, if he ever picked up ‘Freshman Year’ and drank in the story of his life.





	looks through his window’s eye

**Author's Note:**

  * For [sloganeer](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sloganeer/gifts).



> This is nowhere near as a) long or b) explicit as I’d planned, I’m sorry! Life got very much in the way.
> 
> It's also much more past-orientated than future-orientated and for that I am sorry to the prompter – I hope you like it still.
> 
> Title from 'The Passenger' by Iggy Pop.

David keeps a journal. Patrick noticed for the first time in the days before the store opened. One weekday afternoon, the kind of sunny which makes you marvel at the natural light, or how someone looks in it, and Patrick was decidedly not thinking about how David _looked in the light_ but the Apothecary windows sure did let in a lot of it. It was pleasant, is all. He was looking forward to working there, with those windows.

The register hadn’t been set up yet so there was a lot of surface space on the furniture and David was taking full advantage, sprawled across it, elbows splayed either side and head tilted as he scribbled in a book with great intent. His brow was furrowed. Patrick noticed these things, things about David’s eyebrows, and that was okay, because they were distinctive eyebrows. He noticed these things because they were distinctive and he moved to Schitt’s Creek in part to see the world differently and there were in fact lots of things to see – differently. Like he’d never really noticed people’s clothes much, before, and now he did. Patrick had never known exactly how many shades of black there were. He’d never thought to find out.

He noticed all this, the sprawling, the book, David’s furrowed brow, in the process of opening the door. The door which was also a window. “What do we think about pets?”

David jolted up and closed the book in one rather clumsy movement. He blinked at Patrick. “In general? More of a dog person but I could be persuaded.”

“No I mean, in the store. Pets allowed?”

It was like that then. They just… started, or kept going, rarely greeting each other formally, with a ‘hi’ or a ‘hello’ or a ‘how’s it going?’ In retrospect Patrick figures it was nerves. Jumping right into the easy back and forth, the teasing, the painfully obvious flirting, all that was much more simple than upsetting the dynamic with bumbling ‘how are you’s and potentially awkward silences. He’d slotted himself oh so naturally into the flow of David’s life, and every day he came back to the river’s edge, choosing to breathe deep and dive right in, rather than test the waters and find himself chickening out.

David considered. “I think no.”

Patrick nodded. “Always figured you’d be more of a cat person,” he said, breezily, and joined David round the back of the ‘register’, David picked up the book and tucked it under his arm, seemingly on instinct but with an edge of nerves detectable in the way he held himself.

“Very rude of you to assume things, actually,” David was smirking, but his grip on the book was protective. _Oh_.

Patrick would never read it, but he wanted to know. Without really knowing. Without looking. He wanted to know if David ever wrote about him. It was still morning, and he wasn’t going into Ray’s today.

There was a lot of light left. He went for a hike.

 

-

 

David moved in, and brought his journals with him, not mentioning them to Patrick initially but not hiding them either. A few weeks in, he started to write in bed in the evenings, while Patrick was reading. It was a level of intimacy that knocked the air out of Patrick, sometimes. Like matching pyjamas and borrowed keys.

Patrick brought them up for the first time when David brought a new one home, exactly the same black Moleskine. “How far do they go back?”

David looked up inquisitively, understanding when Patrick nodded in the direction of the stack of old journals on the shelf. “Oh, huh. I think high school. There were some from before, junior high, but I left them behind when, well I had sweaters to think of too.”

He’d packed the journals first.

“I used to write in it a lot more. When I first moved here.” David was quiet in the glow of the bedside lamp, and Patrick thought he understood. 

But something buzzed under his skin the next morning. He never kept a diary, a record of his life. David probably had a written account of his first crushes, blossoming understanding of his own sexuality. It wasn’t the wealth and the wild anecdotal stories Patrick wanted to hear more of. No, what Patrick was hungry for was David’s ability to _know_ himself, his desires. He wanted to know what it was like, for David, to actually deal with those thoughts, to write them down and sit with them, to flip back to them, to have the proof of some kind of continuity, developing story, sitting in the pages. Patrick wondered what it was like for David now, if he ever picked up ‘Freshman Year’ and drank in the story of his life.

Patrick wondered what he would have written. He wondered if it would’ve made a difference.

 

-

 

Patrick went to a drugstore out of town, the first time he bought lube. It was his day off. The store had been open a week and they’d both worked the first six days non-stop, early mornings notwithstanding but made better when David sheepishly pushes on the door with a tea at nine thirty each day. David’s first day off had been the seventh day – though he’d bounced in mid afternoon to see how things were going and also, it turned out, to make Patrick take a series of Buzzfeed quizzes so they could compare answers ‘for the store’. “I just think it will really give us some direction, you know?” David had said. Patrick had obliged, leaving David to chew over the results while he busied himself with customer. David chewed things over until closing, and they both stuck around to sweep and replenish.

Today was his day off, and he was making a special trip, out of town, to buy lube. He rolled the window down, feeling a little hysterical, still sensibly under the speed limit but internally things were whizzing through him at a pace he was completely unfamiliar with.

Seven straight days with David. He was keyed up, all of him tense and ready to spring, even his calves- he had to forcibly relax his calves. Nobody had to do that. This was ridiculous.

Once he’d admitted he had a crush, that David made him _flustered_ , it was less like floodgates opening and more like floodgates closing tight, trying desperately not to let on that there was any water back there. Patrick had something to _hide_ now, or at the very least something to keep in check. Putting a name to what he was feeling made it concrete, meant that there were meanings attached to things he did, actions and gestures and words, which could point back to the feeling, make it obvious. Patrick didn’t want it to be obvious, he wanted to think things through, get used to the idea, he wanted to eke the floodgates open inch by inch, alone. But he hadn’t had time alone for seven days, not to think or hike or jerk off in any way but perfunctorily. Instead he’d been around David for hours at a time, staring and bantering and sometimes touching, and his crush had tipped into outright sexual attraction. It was fucking Victorian, and he really liked David’s flash of ankle. Patrick was turned on, near-constantly, and he was figuring out what turned him on, too. Specific buttons which, when pressed, left him unbearably on edge for the rest of the day. It turned out he had a lot of buttons, most of which he discovered only after David pressed them. Really it was like David made them himself, rewiring Patrick from the inside out.

He was with David all day, and by the time he got home every night he was too bone deep tired and horny to do anything but jerk off hastily in the shower and collapse into bed. There wasn’t much time for thinking, for doing anything about those floodgates.

So the drive out of town to the drugstore was for thinking (and making sure nobody recognised him), and the drive home from the drugstore was for thinking. The rest of the day was for, well, still thinking. About other things.

 

-

 

David reads him snippets, very occasionally. After a large glass of wine, feeling particularly comfortable and open, he will turn to Patrick where he sits cross-legged on the bed and tell him about his day, their day – a separate and together thing.

Once or twice, chasing the first glass with another, David has crossed to that specific bookshelf and pulled out a slim volume from 1995, from 2001, from what he calls without fail ‘another life’, flippant and sour. But it is his life, and Patrick drinks it up, wincing internally more often than not, but keeping his real gaze – the one David can see – steady and open.

He’s surprised to find he loves hearing the entries from when David first moved to Schitt’s Creek. He can track the changes: snarky, unimpressed, vulnerable. A gradual transition moving closer to the man he now knows as his _literal husband_ . It’s always a little thrilling. David always stops before the part where he leases the General Store, before Ray’s and number 13 and _threw you a bit of a change up_.

 

-

 

When he was twelve, Patrick now realises, he developed his first crush. His name was Drew and he’d had very neat, curly blond hair and there was nothing more exciting than coming home from school and waiting by the kitchen window to see him running up the drive and stepping up on the porch. Drew never had a chance to ring the doorbell, Patrick had already swung the door open with a “Later, mom!” and a skip over the threshold, every single time.

Patrick thinks if he’d kept a diary then, he might have written that Drew gave him something like butterflies, that the knot of anticipation in his gut that grew every weekday afternoon would bloom into relief every time Drew kept showing up, kept liking him. He might have noticed that most of his thoughts circled back to Drew, reflected in the space taken up on the pages regaling tales of adventure and neighbourhood rivalry and finding another cool lizard basking in the low sun. This was, after all, around the same time that most of Patrick’s friends were talking more about girls – specific girls but also the general concept, which specific girls who were previously just themselves had now started to represent. Surely he would’ve made that connection, drawn that comparison, opened the journal to any given page and seen what was present and what was lacking. It would have been obvious then, he thinks.

He thinks about social media, the only comparable record of the last ten years of his life. He made a Facebook account in college, but never used it in the way he thinks you were supposed to back then. There weren’t any midnight diatribes or drunken confessions, there was no real proof at all that the person behind the account had a feeling subjectivity. He was ‘in a relationship’ and then he wasn’t, and then he was again, and then the next couple of times he and Rachel broke up he left his status blank, because ‘it’s complicated’ was embarrassing and unnecessary, however true. He was ‘engaged’ for seven weeks, then he deactivated his account.

But now- he uses it now. It’s not that he suddenly spends all day scrolling his feed, Patrick knows that in the current political climate he is better to forge and strengthen connections offline. It’s just that these days he experiences a little jolt of tenderness every time he taps open his own profile. His profile picture is of him and David at the store, David swinging his legs from where he’s perched on the counter in a manner that could only be described as ‘louche’, and Patrick, mid-laugh, pointing at something off-camera. Stevie took it on her phone, and he doesn’t remember anything about the context. There have been so many photos since, formal and dazzling and professionally done, but none have made quite as much sense. Underneath the photo sit a few facts: lives in Schitt’s Creek, works at Rose Apothecary, married to David Rose.

And if you scroll down, it’s obvious. Post after post that David has tagged him in, photos in which he has tagged David, captions colouring each one with context and humour. He’s not a big one for social media, but Patrick _wants_ it to be obvious. Everybody should know. If Schitt’s Creek didn’t already have a town crier – and seriously, where was that guy, nobody had seen him in months – Patrick would volunteer himself for the role, swinging that bell to the tune of how much he loves his husband, his whole life.

 

-

 

“I want you,” Patrick breathed. “I don’t, I haven’t-” he broke off to swallow thickly. “I haven’t _wanted_ like this. Before.”

Something passed across David’s face, then. He had Patrick up against the wall in the stockroom, up against it so hard that Patrick was lifted a little, only touching the ground with the balls of his feet. Patrick was giddy with it, all the places where the long lines of David’s body touched his; the press of the wall against his back; the _lifting_. They were beginning to develop a choreography, one leading the other through the curtain, drawing up a repertoire of fingers clutched at hipbones and tongues. It was all still bright and new and shocking but there were things to be expected, now.

What Patrick didn’t expect was for David to bow his head suddenly, kissing his collarbone wetly. “Me neither.”

He hadn’t had any secret locker room trysts, or even any conscious fantasies _about_ locker room trysts, but he had this.

 

-

 

A thirty-fifth birthday, Patrick thinks, is not much to celebrate. He’s fine, of course, not particularly panicked about greying temples or forehead creases – he’s enough his parents son to know that most lines on the face are the signs of a life well lived and jokes well told (or, well, told, in any case). It’s just not a particularly significant age. 

David kept good on his vow to never again throw a ‘surprise’ party and Patrick, who still considers that night to be one of the most significant of his life, would never want one. They went away last year, to a warm place, and the year before, to a cold place, and this year he wants to stay put. He wants to go out for dinner with his husband and drink a little too much mid-range wine and allow this day, this number, to slot in to the rhythm of their days together. Patrick wants to have so many birthdays with David that he can no longer tell them apart.

So there they sit, in an Elmdale restaurant booth not unlike the one they occupied on David’s thirty-fifth birthday (and that, Patrick knows, is a birthday he will always be able to single out from the rest).

“So,” David reaches down under the table for a tastefully plain gift bag and places it on the table before Patrick. “It isn’t much.” He seems uncharacteristically nervous, picking at the skin around one thumbnail and eyeing the bag like it might make sudden movements.

Patrick says nothing, just reaches in with careful hands and slides a tissue-covered rectangle out of the bag. “Oh.” He can feel already, the slight bend and give of the leather, the dimensions, the pages. “David.”

“I thought maybe you might like to write some things down,” David’s eyes and hands are steady now, trying to get his intentions across. He doesn’t have to try very hard. “It’s never too late to start, I think.”

Patrick folds back the layers of blue tissue and smooths his index finger down the spine waiting to be cracked. He looks at David. “No, it’s never too late.”

“What are you going to write?” He’s playful now, diffusing.

“Well I think the first entry will have to be about this super cute guy I’ve got a crush on,” Patrick says, stage whispering. “I can’t stop thinking about him.”


End file.
